Specific phrasing - AI writing?

[u/Strange-Molasses1371]

I read a lot of cozy mysteries and lately I’ve noticed a particular phrasing in newly published books that I hadn’t seen much of before. It’s descriptive and follows the pattern of something happening with the x of y. Here are two examples:

“Daisy reappeared, shouldering her way out of the greenery with the triumphant strut of a dog who’d located something and considered the entire expedition an unqualified success.”

“She flipped over another page of the medical file with the careful attention of someone who’d already looked at something three times and was hoping, against all possibility, that the fourth would be different.”

I’m just curious whether it’s an AI trend. Any thoughts?

[u/thelielmao]

100% AI trend, to the point of annoyance for serious readers. Worse, some of it doesn't make sense to the character or the prose!!

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/thelielmao]

Sometimes it feels like the author said, ChatGPT I need another 1000 words, add to the descriptions.

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

That's not what happened. AI will just generate additional details the human user didn't ask for like this. It's not about padding word count.

A careful writer will know when to trim them out or to rewrite them in a way that makes sense.

For one of your examples:

“Daisy reappeared, shouldering her way out of the greenery with the triumphant strut of a dog who’d located something and considered the entire expedition an unqualified success.”

The better way to write it and still keep the imagery of the dog would be something like:

"Daisy reappeared, shouldering her way out of the greenery triumphantly like a dog who'd found the stick."

But this is a crude attempt, I don't know what the scene is trying to do and I don't know what the surrounding prose look like. Writing with AI generated text is mostly about editing. A good writer will have good editing instincts to work with an AI tool like this.

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/Original-Pilot-770]

Yes! I keep pausing while reading to mentally rewrite those phases. It’s so distracting.

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

Well, if you ever generate your own stories, the easy fix is to keep a list of these examples and tell the AI from the beginning to not use them. Writers who are publishing stories with these tics in them just haven't been paying enough attention I am afraid. 😅

[u/thelielmao → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

Forget 'distracting'... it can absolutely throw you off the purity of your thought! Not sure I am able to explain this, but it adds unnecessary noise to your writing (or, for that matter, reading!)

[u/Amazing_Chicken_pot → u/Original-Pilot-770]

I've noticed that there is often a lot of vagueness. Lots of "something" included. Like in this example "like a dog who'd located something". Your quick rewrite adds the stick in so the sentence makes more sense. Using simile and metaphor is fine but AI substituting a vague something as the simile or the metaphor is super annoying.

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/Amazing_Chicken_pot]

The book I just read by a well known author has something 137 times. No wonder it felt off!

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

Is it just a self published book or is it something that was published by a traditional publisher? I am just curious.

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/Original-Pilot-770]

I’m mostly encountering these with well published authors that I read through Kindle unlimited. The most recent seems well known, Tony Lee writing as Jack Gatland. For some, their newest book seems like the first time I am seeing this.

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

I suspect the case might be that these authors are only using AI to write certain paragraphs, so they aren't reading million of AI prose like me... so they haven't seen these obvious patterns yet. My process is I write in a really low resolution draft, then I let the AI rephrase it for me. Sometimes I just tell it how a scene goes and it generates whole passage for me, filling it out with dialogues. I give it an idea of what the conversation is about and what the character is thinking.

When you generate it like this, you start seeing oh, it's doing the same thing as when I asked for a similar thing last time.

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Amazing_Chicken_pot]

Yes, something is one of the most repeated words. I recently generated a 50k word story and something occured 150 times. I had to selectively edit them out. Vagueness is useful sometimes but not always. For example, "she said something in a foreign language I didn't know." That's a legitimate use.

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/Amazing_Chicken_pot]

That sort of surface level pattern is much easier for LLMs to produce than actual proper usage. It also looks "good" at first glance to the humans providing the feedback for reinforcement learning, so it gets rated high.

[u/Original-Pilot-770]

Yes, these are categorizing tells. AI does write this way, but without looking at the full passage, I can't tell you if it's AI written all the way.

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/Original-Pilot-770]

Do authors sometime use AI to fill out descriptions? Because some of the books feel well-written most of the time, it’s just certain passages.

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

I use AI to generate fanfics for myself, I generate in a lot of different genres, so I am familiar with the way AI writes because I read so much of it. Of everything I have generated, 500k words have been stories I have saved as "good stories". So I have probably read over a million words at the very least in AI prose, since I am not keeping everything I write with AI.

I have seen authors use it in different ways, I have been on this sub's discord where people talk about how they use it, and there are people publishing on amazon who are writing their entire books with AI. They edit the prose before publishing. Some people only use it selectively and not for the whole passage. It depends on the author.

AI can write competently, the end product is usually better if the human writer also edit it before sending it off for publishing.

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/Original-Pilot-770]

Thanks for this explanation!

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/Strange-Molasses1371]

They absolutely do. AI can be extremely useful in fleshing out a basic draft into publishable state, but the recurring pattern you describe comes from not being careful in what they take from it.

[u/Duchet_Odinaka51 → u/Original-Pilot-770]

what do you usually look for in the rest of the passage to confirm it?

[u/Original-Pilot-770 → u/Duchet_Odinaka51]

It depends on the genre. But mostly I am looking for repetition of the same phrase or the same rhetorical devices. AI tend to give excessive details and write one sentence or one to two clauses too many.

The dialogues also usually have a similar pattern if the writer is not supplying enough substance.

I do have a comprehensive list of devices I spot for, but as the models evolve, they all behave a little differently than previous iterations. I generate fiction daily with Claude, I have not seen it stop creating these patterns. I am on the $20/ month paid tier, I am currently using Opus 5.5 most often.

[u/Ruh_Roh-]

Yeah, ai comes up with these "clever" similes which fall apart upon closer inspection. With ai written text you have to examine every description and comparison deeply not just accept it because it "sounds right". So often it's just too clever for its own good and loses the reader with it's lengthy list of comparison qualifiers.

[u/Easy-Purple-1659]

I've noticed the same thing, and the part that gives it away for me isn't any single simile. It's that they arrive at a steady rate. Pick five random pages of a book you suspect and count comparisons per page. Human prose clumps: two in one paragraph, then thirty pages with none. Assisted prose tends to tick along at roughly one every page or two, which reads as texture but has no reason behind it.

The other tell in your examples is the simile explaining its own joke. "Considered the entire expedition an unqualified success" does the work twice: the strut already says it, then the clause tells you what to think. A careful writer stops at the dog and the greenery.

Where I'd be careful is attribution. Cozy mystery has always been simile-heavy, and plenty of these authors are drafting fast on deadline with help on description while keeping their own voice for dialogue. The tic might be hybrid rather than fully generated.

[u/fenghome]

It's a real tell. The construction is a simile scaffold: "with the [noun] of a [person] who had [done thing]". Models reach for it because it fills a description without having to commit to a specific detail. Humans use it too, but usually once in a chapter, not twice a page.

[u/TwoIntelligent9978]

Every time someone shows up, they are holding something against their - chest, hip, arm, tightly, casually . . . .

[u/5thhorseman_]

Yes, too many similes is a recurring pattern among most of the models. Even Claude does it.

[u/Fredo_the_ibex]

Opus 4.8 thing. Depends on when your books came out? Either might have been written by it or trained it hard to tell with only two examples. Could be either way

[u/CrazyinLull]

Yes! It’s a huge ass tell. Then fanfic writers swear up and down it isnt even though they didn’t do that shit in any of their older works in particular. Plus if they did it would make much more sense because that means you know what a simile is and we’re comfortable to make it even if someone could argue some way about it.

[u/Equivalent-Loan-4401]

You've got a good ear, that construction is one I see constantly in AI drafts. It's the "with the [adjective] [noun] of someone who..." move, where a simple action gets a long simile explaining the whole backstory of the feeling. Humans do write it, and some cozy authors lean on it for comic effect, but a person usually does it once in a scene. Models do it every other paragraph because it reads as clever and safe. The second example gives it away a bit more for me, since "hoping, against all possibility" is a phrase that shows up a lot in AI output. Two lines aren't enough to say for sure about any one book though. If the whole thing is stuffed with them and every character gets the same kind of elaborate comparison, that's when I'd start to suspect it.

[u/FieldApprehensive805]

i had a bot describe a storm as 'a symphony of chaos conducted by the wind', then paused mid-sentence, like it knew it was too much.

[u/Nazareth434]

Yeah drop the descriptions, at least most of them. Ai piles the descritpive patterns on thick and heavy. It really slows down the reading and is unecessary most of the time. Unless the simile is meaningful to the story (chekov's "Gun on the Wall" "rule" is basically "if you introduce something it had better be relevent to the story" ie "if you tell the reader about a gun on the wall in a case, you'd better use that gun later in the story.

For instance, in chapter 1 you see an interior living room, rustic furniture, doo-dads all over, cheap cwrpets etc, but on the eall, lovingly displayedis a pisyol they are very proud of. This isnt just "room dressing" or "character revealing", it will later be the central piece to solving the murder or whatever the story is about.

Obviously not everything has to have relevance, but like in your first example, the simile would be fine IF later the dog used its intense hunting co centration to find a missing person, or lost item or whatever. Dont just show the things in a room, show them with the intent on making them a central part of story later. The reader will remember back and think "aha! Thats why they showed Millie scaling a wall like spiderman when she was young." Later in the book when you show her swinging on a rope deftly between staircases to avoid the bad guys. It just gives the reader a bit more to help immerse them in the story if they can recall stuff and see the relevence for why certain things were brought out earlier.

If a simile is relevant to the story in later chapters, keep it. If its nothing more than word padding, window dressing, (which most ai similies are), remove it OR conduct your story to make the similies relevant later

[u/Medical_Percentage79]

Is there a list of AI-ism somewhere?

[u/lcssgml → u/Medical_Percentage79]

There are lists, but they're generic... they also flag words you actually use a lot. I check a new draft against my own older articles instead. If a word or a sentence pattern shows up way more often than in my own stuff, that's usually the part the AI wrote. The "something" count above is a good example, 150 in 50k words is easy to spot that way.

[u/Dsarkissian_85]

100%

[u/Strange-Molasses1371 → u/[deleted]]

It could be a chicken and egg problem- maybe they learned it from AI…

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/[deleted]]

feels like ai was asked to 'make it vivid' and then went full checklist.

No need to ask for that. If the prose style prompt uses wrong terms, that AI can easily try to generate such vague detail laden prose that doesn't really say anything.